Reading Proofs - Clémentine Beauvais

I've just finished proofreading The Edinburgh Companion to Children's Literature, which I'm coediting with Maria Nikolajeva. It's coming out later this year, and it's a pretty thick volume with 29 contributions by some of the best people in the field (including one who may be lurking around on this blog and wrote a brilliant chapter on counterfactual historical fiction. Guess who?)

our baby's cute little face 

Proofreading the mahoosive thing really took over my life in the past week. Proofs in French are called épreuves, which can also mean a chore, trial or ordeal, and it's really what they are. A lot of chocolate is required.

chocolate, coffee and red ink

Reading proofs is one of those activities that are associated to writing, but that are not really writing, and that are absolutely incompressible - you just can't speed them up, you have to go through them. Others include reading contracts, answering emails to plan school visits, all kinds of admin, etc. However, reading proofs has that particular texture, frustrating, mind-numbing and also, as Dianne Hofmeyr says, perversely satisfying, that sets it apart in my mind from everything else.

You have to adjust everything in your life in order to read proofs. Carve out three hours at a time, no distraction, no music, no phone winking at you from the corner of the desk. It will take however much time it needs to take, no less. That's weirdly stabilising. Somewhere in the world, a big pack of pages awaits, and it's got its own internal duration that doesn't care at all about your own clock-bound imperatives. In a world where you don't really take the time for anything, you suddenly have something forcibly taking your time.

You have to adjust your mind to read proofs. Reading line by line, with a ruler blocking the rest of the paragraph, you let your eyes drift robotically across each word, letter by letter, fighting the urge to process everything whole-word as you might usually do. Only then can you spot the mipslaced lteter, the verb ending that doesn't works, the the repeated particle, the sneaky apostrophes', the weird change of font for no reason, the word that missing.

Because of this insane amount of concentration on tiny units of language - the word, the letter, the punctuation mark - there's, episodically, moments of complete brainfreeze. Not sure anymore how 'children's literature' is spelled. Is it childrens literature. Childrens' literature. Chlidrens laterutiure. Can I even speak English anymore ? And you are taken back to childhood, when you would repeat your own name fifty times in front of the mirror and both name and face would gradually disappear into absolute nothingness.

At that stage, profound anxiety strikes. What am I doing with my life? How many people are actually going to read this? What would my 15-year-old self think?

You have to radically adjust what you consider to be existentially meaningful. It's impossible to proofread such a massive academic book without thinking often that these are hours of your life that you'll never get back.  To be clear, the chapters are brilliant, I promise. But for the proofreader there is no newness. You've already read the contributions many times, edited them at least twice on screen. You know that in the grand scheme of things, it absolutely doesn't matter if someone misspelled the name of Valdimir Propp. Yet when you catch that Valdimir, there's this strange endorphin rush, and even though it's such a minute, inconsequential thing, it gives meaning to the whole chase.

Your reward system gets completely mixed up. A week ago, for true joy to occur, you would have needed an email telling you gushingly about how wonderful they found such or such thing you did. Today, a missing comma in a reference list is all you need. What you are doing suddenly has meaning: you spotted that one of the entries in the bibliography isn't in correct alphabetical order.

You have just made the world a tiny bit more orderly.

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Clémentine Beauvais is a children's and young adult author in French and English, as well as a literary translator. Her latest YA novel, Piglettes, is out with Pushkin Press.

The Seven Stages Of A Book - Lari Don

A book goes through many different stages as it travels from the writer’s mind to the reader’s mind, and the writer’s relationship with the book changes at each stage.

This week, I’ve experienced one of the major shifts in my relationship with a book: when it goes from being something I have the power to change, and becomes something I can no longer change, but must now start to promote. And I think I find this shift the most terrifying of all.

But looking up at my shelves, some with only a few sheets of scribbled paper, and some creaking with heaps of notebooks and piles of manuscripts, I realise that I have a book at almost every stage here in my study.

When I’m writing, I go through seven stages of a book, which may be conveniently Shakespearean, but does seem to accurately represent my writing process. I wonder if other writers recognise these stages?

# 1 The thrilling moment when the idea for a book emerges, which may be the only moment the book is ever entirely perfect!

# 2 Thinking and scribbling and considering: ‘what is this story about?’, ‘what am I trying to find out?’, ‘who are my characters?’, ‘what are the big questions?’, ‘what happens next?’ ‘how will I ever defeat the baddie?’ This bit is incredibly exciting, filled with possibilities.

the scribbling stage

# 3 Actually sitting down and writing it. Finding the story and putting it into words. For me this usually involves lots of self-imposed deadlines, late nights and ignoring my family. I find this bit exciting too. (I realise, writing the stages down like this, that I find every stage of writing a book exciting. I suppose that’s why I’m a writer…)

# 4 Turning the story into a manuscript. My first and most personal edit - lots of reading out loud, and cutting the word count by massive slashing and burning. This stage is perhaps less heart-thumpingly exciting but it is very satisfying.

 # 5 The real editing, with an actual editor. This stage can be emotionally draining, but by this time I can also see the original idea turning into a book that other people can read. Which is, of course, quite exciting!

the proofreading stage

 
# 6 Proofreading of the layouts. I did this last week, for my next novel Mind Blind. This stage is both exciting and chillingly terrifying. Any silly little mistakes I miss here will be printed in real books to be read by real readers. Which is a great incentive to keep your eyes wide open and focussed as you proofread!

# 7 Finally, the shift I’ve experienced this week: the shift from the writer creating a story to the writer promoting a book. I’ve stopped meeting new characters, and started having meetings with marketing people. I’ve stopped writing the story and started looking for extracts of the story I can read at book festivals, I’ve stopped thinking about chapter length and started thinking about ‘content’ for websites.

Can you tell I find this final stage a little less exciting? But really, this should be the most exciting shift of all. This is the bit where I look ahead to the story being read by readers, and that is, after all, what really excited me right at the start when I had the original idea, which got me scribbling, which got me writing, then editing…

Anyway, even if I will spend the next few months promoting this teen thriller, I’ve also just had another idea. So I’m starting a new relationship, with a new story and some new questions and new characters, and perhaps that relationship will go all the way too…

Lari Don is the award-winning author of 20 books for all ages, including a teen thriller, fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales and novellas for reluctant readers. 

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Writing Britain - Dianne Hofmeyr

What is landscape to a writer? Waterland, Wuthering Heights, Far From the Madding Crowd are novels I read a long time ago without ever visiting the terrain and yet the landscape seeped into my consciousness… strong, powerful… never to be forgotten.  If we start with books read from childhood, the list might go on forever of experiencing a landscape for the first time through the eyes of a writer. And this is what makes the new exhibition at the British Library: Writing Britain – Wasteland to Wonderland, so fascinating.

Anyone who is slightly voyeuristic (what writers aren’t?) will find the exhibition utterly intriguing.  Access to so many writers’ journals, diaries, notes, sketches, edits, proofs and musings, is the height of voyeurism. In the dimly lit quiet rooms it’s like being a ghost peering over the writer’s shoulder.

Fortify yourself. The exhibition is huge. But as writers or lovers of books, you’ll be richly rewarded. It moves from rural dreams, to the satanic mills of industry and from wild places to water lands, the city and places beyond the city to show how stories are shaped not just by the physical but the imagined physical. If you have an idea of the extent of the exhibition beforehand, you can set the pace. A break in the middle for lunch or coffee is a good option. The dim lighting, lack of bright visuals and... odd to say as a writer – the predominance of text and need to be up close to each glass case to read the words, even the stance of reading standing upright, make it tiring. But the rewards are there.

As I experienced the swirls and loops and fluid flow of ink from Wordsworth's pen, Bronté’s neat and spidery hand, Katherine Mansfield’s firm script in her Suburban Fairy tale, Angela Carter’s italic in her manuscript for Wise Children, the neat child-like hand of Lewis Carroll in his Alice’s Adventure Underground and the fat cursive letters of Virginia Woolf writing her newspaper as a child – it occurred to me that I’m becoming unused to deciphering and reading real handwriting. Will our children’s children lose this skill entirely?

But it’s not just the script and inkblots that makes this all so personal. It’s the very true feeling of knowing how the writer has anguished and altered the words – drawings by John Betjeman overlaid with words, Thomas Hardy’s handwritten insertions on the proof copy of Far from the Madding Crowd, JK Rowling corrections to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. And what must come as comforting to any writer the huge red crossings-out of James Joyce on a handwritten page of Ulysses where the amount of red far outweighs the written word.

It’s a heady mix. Interviews with writers talking about landscape, recordings of writers reading their work, poems of Sylvia Plath, Fay Godwin’s haunting photographs illustrating the moorlands Ted Hughes describes, Wordsworth writing of his sister Dorothy on their walks, ‘She gave me eyes. She gave me ears.’ The Waterlands of Swift and the Wessex of Hardy are conjured up alongside the Willesden of Zadie Smith and the bleak visions of modern urban life as seen in the stark opening lines of J.G. Ballard’s Crash:

Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.

It’s an exhibition that needs revisiting and each time I’m sure a new hidden gem will emerge.

What for me was one of the most moving exhibits was Liz Matthew’s 17 metre concertina book, Thames to Dunkirk, with the names of the Little Boats that went across to Dunkirk written into the water of the Thames combined below the with the words from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves in calligraphy done with a piece of Thames’ driftwood. It seemed to show not just the spirit of those men in the small boats but also the spirit of writers who dare. 

What writer's landscape has affected you most?

www.diannehofmeyr.com 

Page Proofs - how to get rid of nits and lay frogs to rest - Dianne Hofmeyr

With the sea thundering in and the incredible view from this worktop, I’d like to say I’m scribbling away with words flowing faster than my fingers can type. But it’s odd how work timetables catch one out and page proofs in particular have a way of popping up at the least opportune moment. So instead of being on holiday and in full creative mode, I am doing fine-tooth combing on a novel set in a place that couldn’t be more far removed from the sea.

It’s reminded me of how chameleon-like writers have to be.

And page proofs are double-edged swords. It’s exciting to see the formally laid-out pattern the words make on the page – the story is captured never to be undone – but at the same time this moment of absolute finality is terrifying. There’s not much more you can do about it – a comma might help, italics here and there, a word replaced with something that zings more. With a bit of luck one might even get way with a few inserted sentences – a sleight of hand that is made to appear just as a tweak, lest your editor gets too upset. But basically the novel is all there in print. No more ‘what if’s’.

On the other hand, because it’s viewed in print for the first time, the story comes through as a surprise too and often seems much fresher than that tired manuscript that was rewritten and rewritten. Time seems to distance the author from the work so there’s almost the feeling ‘did I write this?’ And if you can forget about the gruelling task that lies ahead of fine-tooth combing, one can almost begin to enjoy the story. In truth even the fine-combing is enjoyable – who doesn’t like to get rid of nits?

And after a very, very long journey, soon the book will be out there

So while I might appear as if I’m staring out over the sea, I’m really in the heart of the Okavango Swamps in Botswana with pythons and man-eating crocodiles and only a red Victorinox Explorer Swiss Army knife for protection against dynamite-brandishing crooks with a sinister goal – to collect poisons from the most venomous frog of all – the Golden Poison Dart Frog in Colombia.

‘It’s not called Phyllobates terribilis for nothing. It has enough toxins to kill ten to twenty people. Poison can last up to a year. Just a single grain on an envelope or stamp would kill anyone licking it.’

OLIVER STRANGE and the Journey to the Swamps is the first of a 3 part series entitled FROG DIARIES that will be published by Tafelberg in June 2012

www.diannehofmeyr.com